selfhelp.com | life improvement blog

Robin, yours is a nice definition, which is focussed on presence and on self-awareness, I enjoyed that. This post again brings me back to one of my main themes of this blog, which is “personal development and spirituality”.
Getting a solid footing on transactional/bargaining values will make you a functioning human being. But it won’t make you a mature adult. You’ll still suffer from transactional, toxic relationships and crises of meaning in your day-to-day life.
Hobbies serve a multitude of purposes. You learn a new skill, it’s (usually) a creative or physical outlet, it often introduces you to new people, it gets you out of that comfy place, it’s usually an achievement of something you’ve always wanted to do or try, and it gives you something interesting to talk about when you meet new people. Being passionate about something different is cool. Passionate people are interesting, and it doesn’t even matter what the passion is. It’s energizing to talk to someone who has a real excited love for something.
Whether it’s a public blog or a private journal, writing is a therapeutic outlet for your thoughts. Totally up to you however you do it; Julia Cameron’s morning pages, a diary that you might go for months without writing in, or random notes typed on your phone.

One day my mentor, Mr. Earl Shoaff, said to me, “Jim, if you want to be wealthy and happy, learn this lesson well: Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” I must admit that this was the most challenging assignment of all. This business of personal development lasts a lifetime.
Eat a wide variety of healthy foods. Eating one thing such as açaí berries or salmon for every meal, while not harmful, doesn’t do all that much to keep your immune system at its strongest. Eat a variety of fruits, plenty vegetables, whole grains, protein sources such as milk, cheese, nuts and fish, and other foods rich in antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids for a healthier immune system. Water is the basic solvent for all the products of digestion. It is essential for removing waste from our bodies and 6 to 8 glasses daily is considered healthy.
In this week’s Nature, we explore how the working environment shapes research quality and morale — and what people can do to strengthen the research enterprise. A survey of more than 3,000 researchers reveals that lab heads view their labs’ practices more positively than do trainees. Roughly 40% of junior scientists say that their labs sometimes cut corners to achieve a desired end.
That might not strike you as profound. But it is. That’s because it’s a value judgment. Ice cream is better than hot stoves. I prefer sugary sweetness in my mouth than a bit of fire on my hand. It’s a discovery of preference and, therefore, prioritization. It’s the knowledge that one thing in the world is preferable to the other and, therefore, all future behaviors will consider that fact.
Get adequate sleep each night. Sleeping is the time when your body grows, so having plenty of sleep is equivalent to giving your body more time for growth. Get between 9 and 11 hours of sleep per night if you’re a preteen or still younger than 20.
As life progresses, you are guaranteed to face a variety of circumstances, changing environments, and new roles that require you to adapt to them. A personal development plan will help you to handle the pressures that come with the continuous changes and challenges, so that you are well-equipped to excel in all the areas in your life.
If there are areas of your job that you do not like, or are not good at, those are the weaknesses that a personal development plan can help you improve on. Confronting these areas and improving on them can help to push you out of your comfort zone. This allows you to experience growth and to improve your skills.
Instead of focusing on problems and obstacles that could happen, think about how great you will feel when it’s done. You can also define how you will reward yourself when you manage to achieve your goal.
Personal development Specializations and courses teach strategies and frameworks for personal growth, goal setting, and self improvement. You’ll learn to manage personal finances, deliver effective speeches, make ethical decisions, and think more creatively.
5. Become an Early Riser. There are many benefits to becoming an early riser, including watching the sun rise, getting some early morning exercise, being able to work on a project just because it’s important to you before the day officially gets started, and so on. In addition, studies show that early rises are happier, healthier, and more productive than their late rising counterparts.
Try stretching. Some stretches can help you to release your spine and improve your posture. If you stretch the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, it can help you to become more upright, and thus make the most of your height. Some of the stretches to try include:
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Are you stuck in some area of your life? In your business, relationships, weight, confidence… do you feel like you’re looking for the missing piece to finally shift it? Do you think you may be the one causing yourself pain? Are you finally fed up and done?
It was the closest I would come to an orgasm for another ten years. If there was a heaven in my little four-year-old mind, I had just found it. Fucking perfection. My own little bucket of Elysium filled with congealed divinity.
Reading connects you with a person that may have lived decades, or even hundreds of years before you were born. It gives you an insight into another world and perspective. And it grows you in the easiest way possible, all from the comfort of your favorite chair. If you’re not a big reader, the best way to start is to either pick your topic and go for the most popular book in that genre (it will be popular for a reason), or just go to the most popular books list on Amazon and start with something short.
It’s been scientifically proven that if you perform this ritual for 21 days straight, you’ll be training your mind to scan for positives instead of negatives. This has been found to be the fastest way to teach optimism and significantly improve your outlook; its effects are noticeable even six months later.
I have experienced by myself after moving and finding new, more productive and successful friends, that I started to be successful aswell. It´s just unbelievable how changes like this can impact your life.
Personal development is a continuous journey. With each step, it becomes easier to see the true value of each activity. The following are just some of the reasons why you get more focused as your personal development progresses:
After a fortnight of this, I would have to say the improvements have been marginal: some extra flexibility here, a little more gratitude there, a lot more to say when the subject of GDP next comes up at a dinner party. The Nicholls book is worth a read even if you do none of the exercises, if only to come away with the knowledge that the successful pursuit of happiness mainly involves not trying too hard. “It’s not unrealistic to think that in stopping trying to be happy, you can find that you’re happy enough already,” he writes. “Paradoxically, it could be that the only reason for you being unhappy is your relentless attempt at trying not be.”
You’re not the same person you were a decade ago or even a year ago. You constantly change as you learn new things and have new experiences. That growth and development supports you on a personal level by helping you improve yourself and your relationships with others.
Transactional/rule-based values rob you of the trust, intimacy, and love necessary to remain an emotionally healthy and happy human being. This is because, when you view all relationships and actions as a means to an end, you will suspect an ulterior motive in everything that happens and everything anyone ever does to you.
While improving our self-knowledge and realizing our true goals can be very liberating, we should not discard the rules of the society in which we live. We must recognize that other people’s value systems are no less important than our own. And we must recognize and accept that we live in a society in which certain personality types and behaviors are more suited towards particular tasks. This is the second key that will open the door towards personal growth.
This is what extremists are: childish. They’re a bunch of fucking babies. Because extremists are intractable and impossible to bargain with, extremists are, by definition, childish. They want the world to be a certain way and they refuse to acknowledge any interests or values other than their own. They refuse to bargain. They refuse to appeal to a higher virtue or principle above their own selfish desires. Therefore, they ruin everything around them.
Some people feel queasy when encountering grow used transitively (as in “grow the economy”). While it may grate on the ears of many, grow has existed as a transitive verb for hundreds of years, initially in relation to such things as crops, then to facial hair and the like, and finally to a small variety of other things (such as a business or the economy). The transitive form of grow sounds peculiar to many people, and you may certainly avoid using it, but it is wrong to state, as some do, that it is always improper or that it does not exist.
Whitmore, Sir John; Kauffman, Carol; David, Susan A (2013). “GROW grows up: from winning the game to pursuing transpersonal goals”. In David, Susan A; Clutterbuck, David; Megginson, David. Beyond goals: effective strategies for coaching and mentoring. Farnham, Surrey: Gower Publishing Limited. pp. 245–260. ISBN 9781409418511. OCLC 828416668.
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Back in 2015, Red Bull took their athletes through a series of “fear exercises” to help them perform better under pressure.They had to drive racing cars on a dirt track, hold their breath under wat…(more)

selfhelp.com | life improvement blog

It’s the time and effort involved that puts me off most kinds of self-improvement. Many years ago, I signed up for an online life-coaching course, and when I complained about the difficulty of one of the exercises I’d been sent – I was meant to make a list of my qualities, keeping to the strict format “I am (quality)” – the instructor immediately replied by email, saying, “Yes, this is REAL WORK, isn’t it?’ I thought: I already have a job, thanks.
Hanging exercises can also help you improve your growth. These might be a little difficult to perform at first, but as time progresses, you will get better at them. All you need is a horizontal bar. Simply hang from the bar with your arms and spine stretched for about 15 seconds. You can continue doing this for two to five minutes every day.
Your genes play the biggest role in determining how tall you will grow, but your diet has a 20% to 40% impact on how tall you become.[11] That means that if your genes indicate that you will be 5 foot 7, then eating a proper diet may allow you to exceed this height by a few inches.
When I picked up my very first personal development book—Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill—that’s when my self-esteem started rising, when I really started to believe in myself and my goals. Reading success books was what pushed me to grow, to change, the motivation behind my goals.
You know your weaknesses, and you’re ready to accept them. After all, nobody is perfect, and there is no need to blame yourself for who you are. Self-acceptance helps you value yourself even though you can criticize yourself.
While I love the flow idea, I think it should try to integrate both worlds, instead of confusing personal development with hard effort that is simply done wrong. Yes of course, there is bad advice in personal development, and there is bad advice in spiritual development. In the end I believe everyone has to be with himself and see what works for him, and not expect something to be the magic bullet. That’s the essence of intelligently taking responsibility for your life.
“The difference between me and a lot of condescending bozos out there is that I don’t give a Fig Newton whether anyone chooses to do it the same, differently, or wearing a gold lamé unitard,” Knight writes. In other words, she is not advocating that all of us quit our day jobs and “step off the motherfucking ledge,” as she did. Still, it comes as something of a shock to realize that the person who has been advising us to push against the lean-in mores of contemporary office culture leaned so far out that she escaped altogether. Many readers will undoubtedly find this inspiring. Others may feel betrayed. What about those who can’t afford to take the risk of stepping away from their lives, as much as they may want to? While they are stuck in their cubicles, mentally redecorating and meditating on death, Knight is sipping piña coladas and writing her next best-selling “No F*cks Given” guide.
A common criticism[37] surrounding personal development programs is that they are often treated as an arbitrary performance management tool to pay lip service to, but ultimately ignored. As such, many companies have decided to replace personal development programs with SMART Personal Development Objectives, which are regularly reviewed and updated. Personal Development Objectives help employees achieve career goals and improve overall performance.
Once you have a realistic timeframe for your goal, it’s important to commit that you will really do it. Be serious about it. If you are not the one who is taking your plan seriously, nobody else will either.
Much of the advice in “You Do You” is geared toward helping readers confront the workplace dissatisfactions of the daily grind. Generally, the idea is to be more assertive. “If a boss doesn’t like the way I operate, she can fire me,” Knight writes. “If a client thinks my unconventional ways aren’t for him, he doesn’t have to hire me.” This is curiously cavalier. Where Storr is concerned with the precarity of modern-day work, Knight is preoccupied with the tedium endured by the office-bound class: pointless morning meetings, irritating group projects. She gives her readers permission not to care too much about always doing their best on the job, because, as she reveals, she knows what it is to be a perfectionist. As an adolescent, she suffered from eating disorders. After graduating from Harvard, she made a career as a book editor at a big publishing house. She was successful, but stressed. Knight describes experiencing panic attacks that required medical attention; to stay calm at work, she kept a kitty-litter box full of sand under her desk so that she could plunge her toes into a simulated beach. In 2016, when she was thirty-six, she left her job and her home in Brooklyn and moved with her husband to the Dominican Republic.
Earning additional formal certifications, such as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification, which requires educators to spend a considerable amount of time recording, analyzing, and reflecting on their teaching practice (many states provide incentives for teachers to obtain National Board Certification).

Here’s the thing about social media: it’s a clipped, cropped and cultivated representation of who we are. It’s not really who we are. We accentuate the best of ourselves. We filter and tweet what we want others to see – and to be honest, that’s perfectly ok. It’s no different to quickly cleaning your house when someone says they’re dropping by; we like to present ourselves in the best light. The key is to be mindful that this is what everyone is doing — everyone.
One day my mentor, Mr. Earl Shoaff, said to me, “Jim, if you want to be wealthy and happy, learn this lesson well: Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job.” I must admit that this was the most challenging assignment of all. This business of personal development lasts a lifetime.
Adler refused to limit psychology to analysis, making the important point that aspirations look forward and do not limit themselves to unconscious drives or to childhood experiences.[16] He also originated the concepts of lifestyle (1929—he defined “lifestyle” as an individual’s characteristic approach to life, in facing problems) and of self image,[citation needed] a concept that influenced management under the heading of work-life balance.[clarification needed]
People get stuck on the second adolescent stage of values for similar reasons, although the results are less severe. Some people are incredibly good at playing the bargaining game. They are charming and charismatic. They are naturally able to sense what other people want of them and they are adept at filling that role. Put bluntly: they’re too good at manipulating people to get what they want. And because their manipulation rarely fails them in any meaningful way, they come to believe that this is simply how the whole world operates. Everyone is like this. Everyone is manipulative and controlling. Love is bullshit. Trust is a sign of weakness.
Storr’s explanation for how we got into this predicament has three strands. First, there is nature. “Because of the way our brains function, our sense of ‘me’ naturally runs in narrative mode,” he writes; studies show that we are hardwired to see life as a story in which we star. At the same time, he says, we are tribal creatures, evolved during our hunter-gatherer years to value coöperation and, at the same time, to respect hierarchy and covet status—“to get along and get ahead.”
But if I were to advise someone on how to grow, I’d say to start with your “passions.” What excites you? What if you were better in that area of your life? What would it mean to you? Once you have this locked down, then the next question will lead to personal growth: “How do you become better in that area of your life?”
Personal development as an industry[4] has several business relationship formats of operating. The main ways are business-to-consumer and business-to-business. However, there are two newer ways increasing in prevalence: consumer-to-business and consumer-to-consumer.
The journey of self-improvement is an ongoing process of constant learning. It gives you the opportunity to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and to work on them. Remember, personal development can help you in all the areas of your life and is therefore largely a personal journey, but one that needs to be prioritised. The benefits are that you grow as a person while growing your skills, you improve your self-awareness, and you boost your confidence.
The development of a Profile of a Quality Collegiate Learner (PQCL) is presented in this paper with the goal of assisting colleges in clearly determining the characteristics they seek to develop in their learners to increase student success. The characteristics that correlate with successful learning performance emerged from the authors’ 20 years of experience in facilitating, assessing, and… [Show full abstract]
Jump up ^ Foucault, Michel, ed. (1986). Care of the Self. 2. Random House. Translated from the French Le Souci de Soi editions Gallimard 1984. Part Two of Foucault’s book describes the technique of caring for the soul falling in the category of epimeleia from the Greek to the classic Roman period and on into the early stages of the age of Christianity.
Show kindness to people around you. You can never be too kind to someone. In fact, most of us don’t show enough kindness to people around us. Being kind helps us to cultivate other qualities such as compassion, patience, and love. As you get back to your day after reading this article later on, start exuding more kindness to the people around you, and see how they react. Not only that, notice how you feel as you behave kindly to others. Chances are, you will feel even better than yourself.
For a while, it wasn’t pretty. I got shoved into some lockers. I got laughed off the football field. It took me almost two years to make any friends. It sucked. I felt the compulsion to try and fit in, to buy into the transactional nature of the high school social life, to “fake it to make it.” But, at the same time, it was those very behaviors everyone expected from me that I hated so much.
Taking the action steps and achieving your change goals depends on recognizing important forks in the road. I make the distinction between the bad road and the good road (there can actually be multiple bad and good roads, but let’s keep things simple). The bad road is the one that you’ve been on for so long driven by the four obstacles I described above; it’s a “feel bad, do bad” road. In contrast, the good road is the one you want to be on; it’s a “feel good, do good” road.
But when she was in college, with people that were motivated to become something in life, she was inspired, successful, and the life of the party. After college, she moved back home, isn’t using her degree and is just skating by.
Put someone up to a challenge. Competition is one of the best ways to grow. Set a challenge (weight loss, exercise, financial challenge, etc) and compete with an interested friend to see who achieves the target first. Through the process, both of you will gain more than if you were to set off on the target alone.
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Ask for feedback. As much as we try to improve, we will always have blind spots. Asking for feedback gives us an additional perspective. Some people to approach will be friends, family, colleagues, boss, or even acquaintances, since they will have no preset bias and can give their feedback objectively.
You can’t live your entire life this way, otherwise, you’re never actually living your life. You’re merely living out an aggregation of the desires of the people around you. To become an optimized and emotionally healthy individual, you must break out of this bargaining and come to understand even higher and more abstract guiding principles.
A healthy research environment is fundamental to good science: it helps people to produce their best work, and feel satisfied in doing so. But the matter is rarely discussed. That’s partly because a lab’s ‘health’ is complex and difficult to assess — the product of a mix of factors, such as inclusivity, communication, career pressures and training. And academics often feel ill-equipped to tackle these matters.
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Write a letter to your future self. What do you see yourself as 5 years from now? Will you be the same? Different? What kind of person will you be? Write a letter to your future self – 1 year from now will be a good start – and seal it. Make a date in your calendar to open it 1 year from now. Then start working to become the person you want to open that letter.
The breaststroke is especially recommended for those who wish to increase their height. Swimming, as already discussed, is a full body, intense exercise – something that will help to lengthen your muscles and build muscle strength.
Because the only way to truly benefit from self-improvement is to one day arrive at a place where you no longer need it. Like a cast for a broken arm. Or a bandage for a deep cut. You put it on, let it heal you. And then you take it off and move on with your life.
These days the big name seed banks make life easy and offer auto-flowering marijuana seeds which flower at a certain point in their growth, feminized seeds which are 95% to 99% female and regular seeds. Of course you can also buy autoflowering feminized seeds to make life super automated.
Personal growth and development provides us with both the incentive and the means to become the best possible version of ourselves. Ironic as it seems, personal growth expands our frame of reference to include the people around us instead of becoming more self-centered. As our world expands, so does our awareness of the possibilities and opportunities around us. This possibility mindset fills us with an attitude of eager anticipation as we start each new day.
The important thing, in any case, is the word “collective.” Brinkmann doesn’t care so much how we feel about ourselves. He cares how we act toward others. His book is concerned with morality, which tends to get short shrift in the self-improvement literature. He likes old-fashioned concepts: integrity, self-control, character, dignity, loyalty, rootedness, obligation, tradition. Above all, he exhorts us to do our duty. By this, I think he means that we are supposed to carry on with life’s unpleasant demands even when we don’t feel particularly well served by them, not run off to the Dominican Republic.
Those for whom the imperative to “do you” feels like an unaffordable luxury may take some solace from Svend Brinkmann’s book “Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze” (Polity), first published in his native Denmark, in 2014, and now available in an English translation by Tam McTurk. Before “Stand Firm” came out, the author’s note tells us, Brinkmann lived “the relatively sedate life of a professor of psychology at Aalborg University.” Then the book became a best-selling sensation. Brinkmann now lives the life of a successful European public intellectual, appearing on TV and radio and travelling the world to lecture “on the big questions of modern life.”
Because I experienced so much hurt in my relationships when I was younger, for much of my early adulthood, I approached relationships in algorithmic terms: I studied books on relating to people and learned how to present myself in ways that minimized rejection, that gave me more influence over people’s perceptions of me. I pursued sex relentlessly, in an attempt to make up for the depth of my emotional pain with superficial, hollow relationships. For many years of my life, I saw friendships simply in terms of utility: I do this for someone so I can get something in return. And the moment a relationship began to cause me pain, I would find a way to escape it.
Anton, there is plenty of opportunity out there right now for online businesses. From whom do you learn at the moment? I have a fairly good overview of the online marketing space as well, maybe I can suggest some people to follow as well.
Read More. Read Often. Nothing is more powerful than the treasure of knowledge and the best way to acquire this treasure is to read as much as you can. Research has proved that acquiring new knowledge satisfies an individual’s thirst for competence, which makes them eventually happier. You must develop the habit of reading books that will help you to acquire new skills and as well as to polish your existing skills.
Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead: For most of us, the path to self-improvement starts by setting a specific and actionable goal. What I’m starting to realize, however, is that when it comes to actually getting things done and making progress in the areas that are important to you, there is a much better way to do things. It all comes down to the difference between goals and systems.
Jonathan Passmore and Stefan Cantore have suggested that one “argument against behavioural-based approaches such as GROW is that their goal nature excludes the potential to explore philosophical aspects of life. Thus GROW may be suited to working in goal-directed areas of sports or business, but may be less well suited to careers conversations, person–role fit or life-coaching conversations where other approaches such as the transpersonal or existential approaches may be more helpful.”[5]